Black Tara/Kali (Updated article)

Ture, Dark Mother of Bones and Blood
Silent night and smoldering ruins
the Wheel always turning
Black heart center
of understanding.
Grant the art of Letting-go
in the still silence
of your dark smile
Om tare tuttare ture soha

Silverstar

The Tibetan Goddess Tara is celebrated with a long prayer called "The 21 Praises to Tara". The Goddess, portrayed as a Gestalt by Green Tara in the center,  has 21 manifestations - peaceful and wrathful - all  expressions of divine mercy and wisdom. In the painting below, Green Tara is surrounded by smaller figures, each representing a different aspect of the Goddess that can offer help and enlightenment  (such as "White Tara", "Red Tara", etc.) 

Black Tara is a wrathful manifestation of Tara, identical in form and, probably  source, to Hindu Kali. Like Kali, she has a headdress of grinning skulls, like Kali, she is black, like Kali she has three eyes. Like many Tibetan deities in the wrathful aspect, She has the fangs of a tiger, symbolizing ferocity, with a ferocious appetite to devour and battle the demons of the mind. Her aura or halo is fiery, energetic, full of smoke that symbolizes the transformative powers of fire.  I have heard Kali described as the "cleansing Fire that burns the forest, so that new Life can emerge".  This may be said of the fierce Black Tara aspect of Tara.

Painting of forest fire in N.M. (2010)

In Hindu mythology, when the world was being devoured by demons, there came a time when even the great Gods couldn't battle them. And so Durga manifested Kali the terrible, the "last ditch savioress". Kali is the One who brings the forest fire, levelling the ground so new growth can occur, the surgeon who cuts away morbid tissue so flesh can heal, the great force that destroys what has become corrupt so that "those who are yet to come" may be born. 

The icon of Kali, dancing on the prostrate body of Shiva, is a strange image to the western dualistic sensibility. Christian theology is dualistic, but Hinduism and Buddhism are not: I will never forget when I was in Ubud in Bali.  The  curbs of Ubud are all painted like a checker board, black and white, as are the altar clothes. This is to remind those who walk down the street continuously of Sekala and Neskala, the continuing balance of Dark and Light, the Visible and the Invisible interacting in  the yin/yang of life.

Kali appears in Bali as the dreadful, fanged, bloodthirsty Rangda, who lives in graveyards. A great ritual battle is yearly performed, where Rangda is fought by the  benign dragon-like creature, the Barong.  But no one ultimately wins. A balance has been achieved, and neither forceful Deity is destroyed, because the battle must continually be fought. And Rangda, work done, often (within the Balinese myth)  then returns to the heaven realms, to become the beautiful, peaceful Uma, wife of their version of Lord Shiva, the God who dances at the end of all things. Kali, whose name means "Time" (Kala) lives beyond form, beyond the pairs of opposites.  She is the truth and peace beyond the skeins of karma and time.

Tara  in Her different aspects has been my revered and mysterious divine teacher for many years. In many ways I see Her 21 manifestations as similar to the "thousand hands" of Quon Yin - all the many ways She helps and heals and teaches.  I won't presume to say I can understand a Goddess:  but if I was going to make a tenuous statement, it would be when you call on a Goddess, She's not going to give you a polite reply that's been spell-checked. The ineffable work with us in the arena of energy, in the field of dreams and soul language.  But Black Tara, and  Kali,  are so important to our time.  Sometimes, when I most despair, I envision Her  dancing Her very tough love, crimson lips full of that vast, vast laughter. 

There's a great old film called "The Shipping News" (with Kevin Spacey) I have and occasionally watch again. It is a remarkable story that demonstrates what Black Tara means to me - lives and dark legacies that undergo necessary transformation, usually violently, and erupting for healing in the cold, windy, and austere landscape of Newfoundland (even the metaphor "new found land" is perfect).  Towards the end of the movie, a storm destroys the old  family's house, a harsh and weary old house haunted with too many dark ancestral secrets, too much ancestral and personal karma.  Literally moored atop a crag, we see the house blown at last in a great storm into the ocean below, vanishing beneath the waves.  Confronting the littered place where it once stood, Spacey (who has become a newspaper reporter) comments:  "Headline: House disappears in storm. The view is great."

                                                                     

 KALI

Kali is called "she who devours time".  Hindu  legend tells that Kali was so full of the rapture of battle that she destroyed all before her as she danced.  None could stop her,  so  at last Lord Shiva lay  down before her.  When Kali stepped on his body  her madness ceased and she stopped at last.  But there is a Tantric interpretation that the aroused (often portrayed with an erection) Lord Shiva represents the ecstasy of death,  and hence trans-form-ation.  Kali is  the destroyer of the illusions of time.

Here is a commentary from an interview I did with Drissana Devananda,  a friend and sacred dancer I worked with when I had a gallery in Berkeley, California in the late 90's.  I feel she expressed the essence of Kali/Black Tara beautifully:

"Kali is the surgeon. She cuts away what has to go. I ask for that quality to come into me when I have to cut something out of my life; an addiction, or a relationship that no longer is about growth. And I ask it be done precisely, cutting away the dis-ease, malignancy, the aspects that no longer serve. That's what Kali is to me: the last resort savior. When the Gods couldn't kill the demonic forces that ravaged the Earth, they called on a woman's wrath.

We've all forgotten that the Goddess, the Divine, dwells within us. She dwells within us all the time, and not just when you wear a mask, or are in a workshop, or a ritual. In Tantric
philosophy, we're all considered emanations of the Gods and Goddesses - we are their
material aspects on this plane of existence. We're not bodies seeking the spirit, we're spirits  
seeking bodily experiences. Sacred performance, for me, is about remembering that. And remembering is truly a devotional practice. In Hindu traditions  everyone has a deity they focus on as their personal deity. In the West, as we reclaim forms of the Goddess for spiritual  practice, we need to create a relationship with the Goddess form we have chosen, in order to manifest what we need for spiritual and emotional growth, to invoke the help of that Goddess. That practice is not just cerebral. We function out of our whole self, our bodies and spirits. The body-mind. That is the place we can re-member, the place we can communicate with the Goddess within ourselves.

Kali is so much about contemporary life. Women need to become angry now.  About the
women of Afghanistan, the meaningless wars, the destruction of our environment.  The demons  of insatiable greed that are devouring our planet. Those souls who await the future are being denied their birthright. Kali is the catalyst for saying "No more".She's the voice of women whose voices aren't being heard, the voice of women who need to open their mouths and speak for the first time. It's time to embrace the sword of Kali and cut away the delusions that are  destroying our world.

 Kali is the ferocious mother who says "get away from my children, or I'll kill you."Mothers aren't saying that. They're giving their children away, giving them away to war, giving them away by allowing our environment to be depleted, giving permission to the powers that be to destroy their future." 

Drissana Devananda (2001)

I found this commentary about Kali in my files, and it appears even AI does not know the author's name.  But explains it rather well.........***   

"Kali's black complexion symbolizes her all-embracing nature. Says the Mahanirvana Tantra: "Just as all colors disappear in black, so all names and forms disappear in her". Kali is free from the illusory covering, for she is beyond the all maya or "false consciousness." Her red lolling tongue indicates her omnivorous nature —her indiscriminate enjoyment of all the world's 'flavors'. Her sword is the destroyer of false consciousness.

Her three eyes represent past, present, and future, — the three modes of time — an attribute that lies in the very name Kali ('Kala' in Sanskrit means time). The eminent translator Sir John Woodroffe in Garland of Letters, writes, "Kali is so called because She devours Kala (Time) and then resumes Her own dark formlessness." Kali's proximity to cremation grounds where the five elements or "Pancha Mahabhuta" come together, and all worldly attachments are absolved, again point to the cycle of birth and death. "

***AI:

"The essay was published anonymously as an "Article of the Month" on Exotic India Art. Publication Date: August 2000.  The text synthesizes ancient scriptural philosophy with art history - the Mahanirvana Tantra Quote:  "just as all colors disappear in black..." directly translates a core philosophical concept from the Mahanirvana Tantra, an essential Indian Tantric text. It explains Kali's iconography using the concept of Nirguna (the ultimate reality beyond form and qualities). The  essayist explains that Kali's nudity represents nature stripped of illusion (maya), and her red lolling tongue represents her cosmic role as the consumer of all things in the universe."